At its heart, The Epic City is a meditation on memory, how people dwell in the private past, while their refusal to confront painful historical events keeps Kolkata’s bhadralok “strangers to ourselves, our heads filled with notions that have nothing to do with the lives that we are living”.

Chute also goes deep into the lives and work of Art Spiegelman (with whom she worked on MetaMaus), Alison Bechdel (whose Fun Home made the leap from graphic novel to Broadway), Matt Groening, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, and so many others. For anyone who wants a crash course in contemporary comics, or wants to teach one, this is your book.

The book is also an elegy for the era before comics went online or morphed into graphic novels, when a popular strip seemed to capture the entire nation’s eyeballs. Fun to flip through; engrossing to read.

A review of a prose novel rarely mentions its paper stock, font or production qualities, but graphic novels can offer a highly visual and physical experience of the book as design object. The Grandville series distinguishes itself, seducing with its embossed hardcover hef...

Many of these illustrations remain fresh in memory, though the tossed-off sketches and previously unpublished work are every bit as illuminating. A treasure trove for fans of the New Yorker, political satire, and graphic design.